This invention relates to a circuit for comparing the relative power of two signals and providing an indication of the greater of two signals and, in particular, to a circuit that provides a stable indication suitable for use in half-duplex communication, such as speaker phones, and other applications.
Anyone who has used current models of speaker phones is well aware of the cut off speech and the silent periods during a conversation caused by echo canceling circuitry within the speaker phone. Such phones operate in what is known as half-duplex mode, which means that only one person can speak at a time. While such silent periods assure that the sound from the speaker is not coupled directly into the microphone within a speaker phone, the quality of the call is poor.
Whether or not to receive (listen) or transmit (talk) is not easily resolved in the particular application of telephone communication. Voices may overlap, so-called “double talk,” particularly if there are more than two parties to a call or more than one person at a speaker phone. Background noise may cause problems if the noise level is a significant percentage of the voice level. Pauses in a conversation do not necessarily mean that a person is finished speaking and that it is time for someone else to speak. A voice signal is a complex wave that is discontinuous because not all speech sounds use the vocal chords. Analyzing a voice signal in real time and deciding whether or not a person has finished speaking is a complex problem despite the ordinary human experience of doing it unconsciously or subconsciously. A variety of electronic systems have been proposed in the prior art for arbitrating send or receive but the problem remains.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,796,287 (Reesor et al.) discloses a speaker phone in which a decremented counter provides a delay to channel switching by the remainder of the circuit. The magnitudes of the line signal and the microphone signal are used in determining whether or not to switch channels.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,879,745 (Arbel) discloses a half-duplex speaker phone that controls the selection of either a transmit or a receive audio path based upon a present state of the speaker phone and the magnitudes of three variables associated with each path. The three variables for each path include signal power, noise power, and worst-case echo.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,418,848 (Armbrüster) discloses a double talk detector wherein an evaluation circuit monitors voice signals upstream and downstream of echo canceling apparatus for detecting double talk. An up-down counter is incremented and decremented at different rates and a predetermined count is required before further signal processing takes place.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,598,466 (Graumann) discloses a voice activity detector including an algorithm for distinguishing voice from background noise based upon an analysis of average peak value of a voice signal compared to the current sample of the audio signal.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,692,042 (Sacca) discloses a speaker phone including non-linear amplifiers to compress transmitted and received signals, and level detectors to determine the levels of the compressed transmitted and received signals. The compressed signals are compared in a comparator having hysteresis to enable either transmit mode or receive mode.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,764,753 (McCaslin et al.) discloses a double talk detector that compares the send and receive signals to determine “Return Echo Loss Enhancement,” which is stored as a digital value in a register. The digital value is adjusted over time and is used to provide a variable, rather than fixed, parameter to which new data is compared in determining whether to send or receive.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,867,574 (Eryilmaz) discloses a voice activity detection system that uses a voice energy term defined as the sum of the differences between consecutive values of a speech signal. Comparison of the voice energy term with threshold values and comparing the voice energy terms of the transmit and receive channels determines which channel will be active.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,138,040 (Nicholls et al.) discloses comparing the energy in each “frame” (thirty millisecond interval) of speech with background energy to determine whether or not speech is present in a channel. A timer is disclosed for bridging gaps between voiced portions of speech.
Typically, these systems are implemented in digital form and manipulate large amounts of data in analyzing the input signals. The Sacca patent discloses an analog system using an amplifier with hysteresis to avoid dithering, which, to a large extent, is unavoidable with a simple amplitude comparison. On the other hand, an extensive computational analysis to determine relative power takes too long. The Eryilmaz patent attempts to simplify the amount of computation but still requires manipulation of significant amounts of data. In all these systems manipulate amplitude data, or data derived from amplitude, up to the point of making a binary value signal indicating receive or transmit.
Some of the prior art systems use historical data, e.g. three occurrences of what is interpreted as a voice signal. Such systems require large amounts of memory to handle the historical data and the current data.
Although implementation details are generally not discussed in the foregoing patents, the prior art typically uses capacitors for sampling a signal, for coupling a signal between stages, or for other purposes. A problem with capacitors is that the capacitance changes with age. Another problem is that capacitors are hard to match, requiring calibration of the system. Finally, capacitors are expensive and, except for very small values of capacitance, cannot be implemented in integrated circuit form.
In view of the foregoing, it is therefore an object of the invention to provide an improved circuit for providing an indication of the greater of two signals and, in particular, to a circuit that provides a stable indication suitable for use in half-duplex communication.
Another object of the invention is to provide a circuit for arbitrating between competing signals without extensive or high level computations.
A further object of the invention is to provide a circuit for comparing signal levels digitally without the use of capacitors.
Another object of the invention is to provide a transmit/receive arbitrator that can be fully incorporated into an integrated circuit.
A further object of the invention is to provide an arbitration circuit that condenses sample data for arbitration.
Another object of the invention is to provide an arbitration circuit that includes condensed historical data in the arbitration.